In recent years, the telecommunications industry has experienced rapid growth by offering a variety of new and improved services to customers. This growth has been particularly notable in the area of wireless communications, e.g., cellular and mobile radio systems. One of the factors that has led to the rapid growth in the wireless arena is the objective of allowing a user to be reached any time, and anywhere. Unfortunately, the industry has not been able to reach this goal even though large and small companies and various consortiums are frantically building vast networks in an effort to capture a share of this booming market.
Despite their efforts to provide seamless and blanket coverage for wireless telecommunications, some areas remain unaccessible. One particular difficulty is communication within a substantially closed environment, such as a building or other structure which can interfere with radio waves. The structure itself acts as a barrier and significantly attenuates or reduces the signal strength of the radio waves to the point that transmission is not possible at the frequency and power levels used in these systems.
The industry has toyed with a number of options to extend coverage into buildings and other substantially closed environments. For example, one solution to this problem has been to distribute antennas within the building. Typically, these antennas are connected to an RF signal source by dedicated coaxial cable, optical fiber, and, more recently, unshielded twisted pair wires. In such systems, various methods of signal conditioning and processing are used, ranging from straight bi-directional on-frequency amplification and band pass filtering to select which service or service provider to transport, to frequency conversion methods to move the signals to a more desirable segment of the frequency spectrum for transport. Some systems also use passive antenna methods and "leaky" coaxial cable to radiate signals within the desired area without any signal conditioning. Unfortunately, the costs associated with installing such systems are prohibitively out of line with the benefits derived by the in-building coverage area provided by the system.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for an economically viable system and method for distributing RF signals in a substantially closed environment.